TOP 10 TOOLS 2009
Tim Kindberg

My name is Tim Kindberg, I am Lead Graphic Designer at Trivantis Corp.  I am an eLearning Developer, Multimedia Expert and Actionscript/Flash Designer. I work in Cincinnati, OH at Trivantis. Trivantis is an eLearning company that makes Lectora, a powerful yet simple to use eLearning content publisher.

Tim's Top 10 Tools as at 8 April 2009

1. Trivantis Lectora Professional Publisher – Granted my company makes this software, but no software has as easy of a learning curve as Lectora when it comes to eLearning course development. It publishes to almost any LMS with AICC and SCORM compatibility and has been growing in features and ease of use every year since 1999. Has very robust test creation capabilities.
2. Adobe Flash Professional CS3 – I have not used CS4 yet, but if you know how to use Flash, especially Actionscript, then you have one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. Flash continues to amaze me with its growth and power. You can create content for web, desktop (AIR), mobile phones (FlashLite), videogame platforms, and one day I would not be surprised if it was used to create the application that powered your kitchen appliances. It’s an amazing time to be a Flash Developer.
3. Adobe Photoshop CS3 – What is eLearning without graphics? Do you really expect me to use another graphics editor? I don’t think so.
4. Notepad++ - Best simple text editor on Windows, hands down. Plus its free!
5. Twitter – The best way for me to keep up with the Flash and eLearning community is through twitter. I love this microblogging service for it’s up to the minute community connection. It’s 140 character limit really forces microbloggers to shorten their entries to the truly necessary information.
6. Digsby – Chat application. It can connect to almost any chat service, social networking service, and email service. Brings all the magic together into one great application that is constantly being improved.
7. Google Chrome – My favorite browser. Smokes all others with it’s incredible speed. Once they start adding things like RSS feed support and add-on support, it will truly blow Firefox out of the water.
8. Gmail – Best web-based mail application. Google just has their stuff together.
9. Lynda.com – A great subscription based website for learning applications.
10. Adobe Captivate – A tool for capturing user interactions on screen and playback of those interactions.